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Quantum Physics

Title:
How to share a quantum secret

Abstract: We investigate the concept of quantum secret sharing. In a ((k,n)) threshold
scheme, a secret quantum state is divided into n shares such that any k of
those shares can be used to reconstruct the secret, but any set of k-1 or fewer
shares contains absolutely no information about the secret. We show that the
only constraint on the existence of threshold schemes comes from the quantum
"no-cloning theorem", which requires that n < 2k, and, in all such cases, we
give an efficient construction of a ((k,n)) threshold scheme. We also explore
similarities and differences between quantum secret sharing schemes and quantum
error-correcting codes. One remarkable difference is that, while most existing
quantum codes encode pure states as pure states, quantum secret sharing schemes
must use mixed states in some cases. For example, if k <= n < 2k-1 then any
((k,n)) threshold scheme must distribute information that is globally in a
mixed state.